Tiivistelmä

The purpose of this thesis was to find out how satisfied the Company X's customers are with Oulu store's service level and the aim of the project was to create suggestions for the Company X, how to improve the customer service at the Oulu area’s store.

Christian Grönroos' (2007) theory of total received quality was used as conceptual framework in this thesis. The theory was used for explaining the expectations and per-ceptions of Company X's current and previous customers. This theory was chosen for this project to help to evaluating customer satisfaction. Also Parasuraman’s, Zeithaml’s and Berry’s (1988) gap theory was used in this project. Their ServQual tool was more than helpful in analyzing the gaps between expected and received quality.

Project is descriptive and a quantitative approach was taken on at the survey. Two cus-tomer satisfaction surveys were done; one for the current customers and one for the pre-vious customers. They were both sent out at the same time to the customers; the current one was handed out to the customers at the store right after they had finished shopping and the previous customers’ survey was sent out to them by mail. The response rates were low for both questionnaires, compared to the fact that the research was quan-titative. However, it was still possible to make the analysis, with the help of ServQual tool, which was used for analyzing the gap questionnaire’s results of the survey.

The results of the research indicate that the current customers of the Company X are very satisfied, while the previous ones are not. This is due to an unstable customer service. The reason the customer service is unstable seems to be the fact that the sales personnel is not motivated. Therefore it is suggested that the personnel would be offered some incentive, such as sales competitions and secret shoppers.